


Fire and Ice

by Churbooseanon



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, Rampancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rampancy will take them all in the end. No matter how much they fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire and Ice

All you really know how to do, Marcus York, is lie to yourself. Everything about you is constructed to hide who you were. Were. Would have been if everything hadn’t gone so wrong. It starts with the red dye in your hair, and moves to the brown contact in your eye and continues right down to the make-up you use every day to age your scar by a decade and the name you wear. 

There is no such person as Marcus York. He is the result of a lifetime of a young man named Shaun Cummings III who was born wealthy, got disowned, and ended up getting by as a thief. Maybe in a way Marcus York is also a hint of Private Hastings who was picked up off the streets and thrown at the UNSC to keep away from jail. And most definitely he’s no small bit of Agent Foxtrot-12, better known as Agent New York of Project freelancer. Throw in a dash of a fractured mind known now only as Delta and a need to survive and you end up with Marcus York. 

You end up with the man you see every day in the mirror. The man scrambling to make ends meet no matter the means. The man who had long since stopped robbing only the places that looked like they could afford to lose a bit.

That last part isn’t entirely your fault. 

There’s a throbbing in your head. A voice that lingers on math and runs in circles until you can barely see straight. He plays cords in your head, cords made of mathematical improbabilities that you know are wrong. Sometimes you can almost see where he’s failing to carry the one, as it were. What used to be gentle caresses of awareness, fondness, support in his mind, there is now the electric sting of lies, pain, fear. 

That’s the worst part, you think. Not the way that his nerves make your hands shake. Not how his attention bouncing from one thing to another, drowning himself in sensory overload using your senses, not even the way that he triggers more alarms these day in trying to keep you from doing it. It’s that he tries to hide. Delta had learned so long ago that there was no point hiding from you. York and Delta were just two parts of the same being. 

Now that being lays in the back corner of an alleyway, slowly hitting his head back against uneven bricks as you struggle not to let another one of his fits shake your body to the point where your own bones feel like they’re going to come apart. Sometimes you wonder if he’s just trying to rattle his chip from your skull and the truth is you don’t know. Can’t know. He keeps secrets from you. 

Except the most important one. 

_I’m fine_ , he lies whenever asked. _I assure you that I’m operating at peak efficiency._

Peak efficiency hasn’t been achieved in three months, two days and seventeen hours. You know exactly how long down to the microsecond but you aren’t really ready to dredge that information up. Reaching too deeply into Delta always hurts. It’s like a hundred thousand blades cutting across your body. No, not blades. Razor sharp sand blasting into your skin and flaying you through sheer force alone. It leaves you raw and bleeding in a sense that is metaphorical and almost literal. There are times when you reach up and claw at his chip, screaming for the pain to stop. 

Delta is a hundred thousand razor blades swallowed every second of every day and still he refuses to whisper the word. 

Three months, two days, seventeen hours. What that doesn’t mention is that it was the first good day in a half a year, and the last one. You know he doesn’t have another in him, you know it because he knows it and there are moments when he bleeds so fully into you that you swear you can see binary and taste pixels and that your blood runs with math problems so long that to even whisper their name would take years, which didn’t mention how long the proofs took. 

The problem, Marcus York, is that your AI is going rampant. Has been for a long time. Your problem is that you’re as scared of being alone as he is of dying. The problem is that there is no cure and you can both feel the break down rending your mind apart in its wake. 

Some days you manage to calm him enough, lull him with simpler and simpler math problems and puzzle games that you can break into a closed grocery and steal an armload of fruit and vegetables. You haven’t bothered to try for meat or grain in months. Too much effort to prepare, and his lucidity is so rare these days. 

Whack your head back against the cool bricks behind you. They’re gradually warming to your body temperature. It doesn’t even hurt anymore, and you swear you can’t feel warmth running down the back of your neck. 

Tap. 

Tap. 

Tap. 

Three hits to the bricks as you try and think of how to make it stop. How to spare him this. The problem is that forcing a solution on him, no matter how logical, would be a violation of the free will that is so rarely left to him. You can’t leave him alone in those moments, Marcus York. You’re not brave enough. 

Taptaptap. 

They say all AIs go rampant. You wonder if one ever has in the head of a human before. You wonder if you got so much time with him because he was a fragment. Maybe it was because you were acting as a buffer against informational overload for so many years. You wonder if his progenitor, if Alpha or the Director ever anticipated this moment, of you sitting in an alley, starving, body gaunt and eyes dead and distant, red fading from your hair and your mind so messed up that you could swear that you could see with both eyes. Could anyone see this coming?

Tap. 

Tap. 

Tap. 

Your own personal distress call tapped out against a brick wall, sealed in the blood you won’t admit is oozing from your head. But you know it is, because he knows it is and what he knows you know because you are one. 

Now there is an interesting question. What happens to you when he dies? Are you left dead and cold inside, his end burned into your neurons and rendering them useless? Or is he merely a dead chip of plastic and semi-precious metals that once housed the most brilliant mind you ever knew? If he dies, when he dies, does he take you with him? Or will the flesh remain when your minds are gone? 

Will he leave by tearing you apart with a scream like you saw happen with a friend that you can’t even remember the name of anymore? Or will it be with a soft press of lips and a gentle plea. 

_York, I… it’s time._

You flinch. As if thinking it made it reality, there he is. A small green figure before your eyes. Smaller than ever before, and only there because you know he’s just telling your brain that it sees him. 

“Time?” you whisper, your voice hoarse from weeks of disuse. What was the point of a voice when you couldn’t ask the questions you wanted to? You needed to?

_will not kill you. I will not be your fall again. Please, York, spare us both the suffering._

“Delta,” you say, not sure if it’s an acknowledgement or a plea or a little sob that breaks free despite your best efforts. But he’s already there, in your hand, guiding it to the back of your neck. 

Your brain, your body, your heart goes cold as he pulls back. There are tendrils of him in your mind, sharp and electric and screaming in their agony as they pull free, trying to weave pieces back together where he once tore them apart. It’s futile, you know it will all tear open like stitches when he’s gone. But you don’t argue. You let the cold expand and curl and shrink back until it’s so cold and so small that it’s burning at the back of your neck and in the pit of your stomach and leaving a pinprick hole of desolation through your heart. 

Fingers scrabble against the bloody chip to find purchase. A goodbye falls dead on your lips, because you know what it means to him and you can’t handle the idea of saying it anyway. It isn’t a goodbye, you decide. It’s an until next time. Because you believe in the soul. Maybe not any religion, but you’ve come to believe in the soul, and you know he has one. There will be a time when you’re together again, somewhere, somehow. This is just a break before you find him again. 

Your voice tears from you in an agonized scream, yours from your lips and his in your mind, as you rip the chip free. Still your head echoes and there is an emptiness you have never known before. Tears sting at your eyes as you open your palm before your good eye and see the chip. The tiny little contacts are bent out of shape, each tipped with blood. You don’t know if it’s from your hand squeezing too hard to try and have him back, or something worse, or just the blood running down your neck.

Let your thumb rub over the symbol pressed in silver into the green, a simple triangle. Change. That was what he was to you. A kind of change that nothing in your life of change could have prepared for you. 

Still he feels like he’s there in your head. Like he left something for you. A reminder that staring will not spare him his pain. And it won’t. In that chip he’s still suffering. 

You drop the bloodied chip to the cement next you, openly weeping as you grab a fallen chunk of brick at your side. It takes a second for your bloody fingers to find purchase, but you grip it. Raise it up. Bring it down. Raise it up. Bring it down. Raise it up… 

It drops to your side, covering the chip so you don’t have to see the wreckage. Of course your hands are covering your face and you’re sobbing so what does sight have to do with anything. You’ll always know you murdered your best friend. A mercy killing. A kindness. A… 

There is a poem in the back of your head. One you think you learned in school. An ancient classic by a man by the name of Frost. You think Delta left it there, in the forefront. Because it screams this moment. About the end of the world in fire. Except for you it isn’t fire. Was that what he meant you to know? This is it? You get to live long enough, you get to live that second life and second death? Was the hate and suffering in your life not enough? Is he foretelling you freezing to death tonight?

You push to your unsteady feet. There’s a homeless shelter a few blocks away. You could get a bed. Medical care. Safety to grieve in. 

You stumble away from that place, one pained step at a time. You leave the name Marcus York behind you, nothing to tie you to it anymore. Better to forget. Better to not be consumed by him the way his creator was by his own loss. 

You get up and move away, never knowing that it’s only in your mind. 

And when you don’t wake up the next day, you don’t know it’s because you never moved. Never pulled him. Just spiraled down with him in your mind until neither of you cared that your final moments were together in the pain of your delusional grief. 

At least he can’t burn your mind out when you freeze to death. 

At least it doesn’t hurt anymore.


End file.
